I haven't finished the book yet, but it doesn't look like they are in there. Gunpowder weapons did exist and had a big impact on warfare during the Sengoku period and later. I have also read about ninja using gunpowder bombs as weapons and breaching charges.

Oh, teppo are matchlock firearms ?

There is a whole in-universe reason for why Rokugan has both banned the use of Gunpowder weapons, and made it equivalent of blood-sorcery in how socially heinous it is.

Don't know if it's mentioned in the core (or if it's retconned) since I still haven't got my copy.

There's a reluctance to simply introduce gunpowder and related technology into the setting in a big way. This isn't, as is often believed, because gunpowder weapons (especially early ones) were really all that great; rather, you nail it when you say, "had a big impact on warfare". The RMA (revolution in military affairs) that gunpowder provoked was the ability to train--relatively quickly and cheaply--nearly any illiterate peasant to become an effective soldier. To the extent that there were "classes of professional warriors", who developed skill at arms through dedicated training and long experience, cheap, easily-used and effective gunpowder weapons upended that. The L5R setting generally wants to maintain the former--a class of skilled, elite warriors forming the core military component of the clans--so introducing the latter in a big way would tend to undo that.

Of course, in YOUR Rokugan, you can do as you please. The tension between skilled warriors who have dedicated their life to their deadly craft, and the rise of multitudinous peasant levies who could potentially gun them down en masse at a distance, could be a really interesting setting for an RPG campaign.

19 minutes ago, DGLaderoute said:

To the extent that there were "classes of professional warriors", who developed skill at arms through dedicated training and long experience, cheap, easily-used and effective gunpowder weapons upended that.

I still find it ironic that this came to a full circle in the end.

Simple, since the white deer battle vs gaijin, black powder is forbiden in Rokugan and an imperial crime as blood magic is. Thus, it's normal to not mention these weapons, or it's not Rokugan.

Of course, if you want gunpowder weapons, you could look into Imperial Histories 2, which had a couple of alternate history or future settings which included firearms. The rules won't quite work, but it will give you some hints.

It would be intriguing to have teppo introduced during the course of the game...

From reading the Oyumi description at 236, Rokuganese are already kind of uncomfortable of ashigaru (peasant-class warriors) using crossbows, so you can imagine the controversy of using guns. Although it will be interesting as a campaign plot to invent guns to defend Rokugan from the shadowlands, but the anxiety of its invention within inter-clan politics; similar to our worlds nuclear weapons.

3 minutes ago, HelloRPG said:

From reading the Oyumi description at 236, Rokuganese are already kind of uncomfortable of ashigaru (peasant-class warriors) using crossbows, so you can imagine the controversy of using guns.

This actually doesn't make a lot of sense in Rokugan. Crossbows and guns were big in our world because the difference between "conscripted peasant" and "warrior elite" was rather... meager. Especially in feudal Japan where the ashigaru were often a lot more skilled and disciplined than the 'samurai'. The feudal "warrior elite" had a large equipment advantage and once that gap started to close up (mostly via crossbows and creative army organization), the cat jumped out of the bag and the "warrior elite" lost all legitimacy.

HOWEVER, the "warrior elite" in Rokugan is a true warrior elite. They are not glorified grunts with plate armor and horses, the average samurai is objectively much better trained and infinitely more disciplined than an ashigaru. So even if the equipment gap disappears, the training gap stays, and that's not good news for your ashigaru troops, guns/crossbows or not.

2 hours ago, DGLaderoute said:

Of course, in YOUR Rokugan, you can do as you please. The tension between skilled warriors who have dedicated their life to their deadly craft, and the rise of multitudinous peasant levies who could potentially gun them down en masse at a distance, could be a really interesting setting for an RPG campaign.

In the Rokugan I am currently putting the finishing touches on in my game, the lessening of the ban on letting ashigaru use teppo led to a massacre of a samurai army during a minor rebellion, followed by a wave of anti-technologist samurai turning on the Empress. Unfortunately, the Empress proved to be Tony Stark, and the true Daughter of Heaven, and steam engines proved to be channels of the Void and thus inherently magical. So, when she took back her throne at the head of a professional peasant army, wearing steam-engine drive power armor, she issued a proclamation abolishing the Great Clans and the caste system entirely, and ushering in a new era of rapid (and uneven) technological innovation, military expansion, and social reform.

Welcome to my Meiji era Imperialist Rokugan with magical steam-powered automata.

1 hour ago, Tonbo Karasu said:

Of course, if you want gunpowder weapons, you could look into Imperial Histories 2, which had a couple of alternate history or future settings which included firearms. The rules won't quite work, but it will give you some hints.

It would be intriguing to have teppo introduced during the course of the game...

The rules aren't hard. Grab the SW or Genesys stats, use the listed damage, and the severity should be bout 10-(2 x crit rating) (min 0). They always take the reload quality. Advantage spends all come straight across. A despair trigger should become a 3 kept strife trigger. A triumph should be changed to 3 opportunity.

For the reasons above don't expect much black powder support in the books. There will probably be rules at some point, but in the game such weapons have typically been extremely rare.

Gunpowder weapons have been outlawed in Rokugan for two major reasons.

First, outside of the battles with the Shadowlands, the battles between the clans is meant to be general civil and avoid the kind of collateral damage that occurs when you are firing lead balls, setting off canons and throwing grenades at one another.

Second, and FAR more importantly, gunpowder weapons basically render a samurai's armor useless and can be used by a peasant as easily as it can be used by a samurai. While skill can allow you to hit more accurately and fire faster, it doesn't make nearly the kind of difference it does with people fighting with swords or spears.

Samurai in their armor, with their lifetime of training with swords, bows and spears, are basically like invincible tanks on the battlefield over-running all of the peasants deployed with relative ease. Only if GREATLY outnumbered, out-maneuvered and overwhelmed is there any chance that conscript farmers, even those with a bit of training, going to beat a samurai.

But deploy some peasant units with teppos, and they can cut down the most powerful, experienced and "invincible" samurai cavalry. And while the shugenja might be able to level the battlefield by causing rain or something-- it would fundamentally disrupt the entire Rokugani social order. In fact, forget just the clans deploying them-- if bandits got their hands on them, the samurais' job would be made so much more difficult, if not outright impossible.

Firearms were outlawed in the Edo period in Japan for exactly the same reason. Yes, even during that period they existed, but only in the hands of those the Shogun allowed and further import was forbidden.

In Rokugan, there is some reason to think that the Imperials /might/ have firearms that they could deploy in defense of their city. There is this minor clan called the "Tortoise Clan" who controls have the bay leading to the capital and "illegally" trades with foreigners, the exact people who still make and use firearms, and it is pretty much understood they do so for the benefit of the Imperials while trading with foreigners is illegal for all other clans. Of course, the Unicorn, Mantis, Phoenix and Crane all do trade with foreigners, but the only clans even hinted at ever utilizing black powder weapons are the Crane and Dragon and even in these cases, it is more primitive grenades/mines than anything that would leave behind a physical object that could implicate them as using the weapons.

A person in Rokugan walking around with a teppo has basically already signed and sealed their own death warrant. There isn't a single samurai (or non-samurai, to be honest) in the empire who would not take the opportunity to jump on them and turn them in for the honor, status and glory it would gain them for having defeated someone so flagrantly violating the Imperial Law.

2 hours ago, HelloRPG said:

From reading the Oyumi description at 236, Rokuganese are already kind of uncomfortable of ashigaru (peasant-class warriors) using crossbows, so you can imagine the controversy of using guns. Although it will be interesting as a campaign plot to invent guns to defend Rokugan from the shadowlands, but the anxiety of its invention within inter-clan politics; similar to our worlds nuclear weapons.

Lol, using Mao to preserve Rokugan could be betterly welcomed than using gunpowder in this same objective. Doing this is direct defiance to a secular imperial decree, a direct disobeyance to the Emperor will… Good luck to anyone who would try this, the fact it could be successfull or not will not be considered for your defense; in fact you will not have any defense and you will suffer a dishonorable death and probably have your name erased from history and probably your family ashamed. You could instead envision to flee forever outside the Empire and letting your family to assume your shame instead of you. Basically you die and do another PC or you flee, become dishonorable npc and create a new pc.

There's actually another, intriguing aspect to this--that of technological advancement. Rokugan is, by the standards of a real-world society, weirdly stagnant in its development of new and innovative technologies. Now, to be fair, we've never had the chance to see just what effect an objective certainty that there are divine beings, they live in a Celestial Heaven and other spirit realms, they can intervene in mortal affairs, there is an afterlife, etc. would have on a society. The result might actually be long-term stagnation in terms of societal development; after all, if there actually IS a Celestial Order and, by divine decree, it is declared to be perfect as it is, what incentive is there to rock that particular boat? There might be individual or small-scale attempts at change, but it's quite possible that the society as a whole is quite content to remain "as is" because, well, it's perfect "as is".

Introducing gunpowder technology is, then, a degree of innovation that would fly in the face of that "perfect as-is" way of thinking. It not only stands to empower anyone to be able to deliver potentially lethal effects at a distance that makes swords and armor obsolete (generally only if employed en mass, in the case of early gunpowder weapons, but that still makes it a thing), it threatens to provoke further societal changes. On top of that, in this setting, gunpowder is generally considered a gaijin technology, so it originates from outside the Celestial Order, making it even more reprehensible.

All that said, disallowing gunpowder becomes another way of reinforcing (and rationalizing) the strange "frozen in time" nature of Rokugani society--1123 years of no meaningful technological or societal advancement at all!

3 minutes ago, DGLaderoute said:

All that said, disallowing gunpowder becomes another way of reinforcing (and rationalizing) the strange "frozen in time" nature of Rokugani society--1123 years of n  o meaningful technological or societal advancement at all!

No admitted advancement.

1 hour ago, fbtn said:

Using Mao to preserve Rokugan could be betterly welcomed than using gunpowder in this same objective  .

In all technicalities, this also brings up another thing in Rokugan; A powerful magic-user is as effective as armies of well armed soldiers, so there isn't any need for inventing new weapons per se. Which kind of make sense, because Rokuganese are more obsessed in finding theological truth than progressing "practical" technology.

2 minutes ago, HelloRPG said:

In all technicalities, this also brings up another thing in Rokugan; A powerful magic-user is as effective as armies of well armed soldiers, so there isn't any need for inventing new weapons per se. Which kind of make sense, because Rokuganese are more obsessed in finding theological truth than progressing "practical" technology.

I am not so terribly sure of this. Yes, they say that sometimes and on occasion we see shugenja doing things so powerful as to suggest they could counter an army, but most of the time-- the shugenja tricks are not so overwhelming or reliable that they make armies utterly obsolete as this would suggest.

If they were that powerful, the empire would just do away with samurai and ashigaru all together and the entire empire would just be run by shugenja shaping the empire and lording over everyone using their godly magic.

Rather instead, we see the samurai without any magical abilities being the heroes, champions and shapers of the world more often than shugenja are.

I fear we are getting dangerously close to the subject of the printing press, and how bizarre the idea is that Rokugani does not have widespread use of a technology common to 7th century China.

37 minutes ago, sndwurks said:

I fear we are getting dangerously close to the subject of the printing press, and how bizarre the idea is that Rokugani does not have widespread use of a technology common to 7th century China. 

Or if Rokuganese is something akin to real world Japanese....some of the names are very silly if used in the real world. For example, Otou-san-uchi = literally translated as "Father's house" [お父さん家、お父さんっち]; "I'm going to Otou-san-uchi! (僕はお父さんっちに行ってくる！）" "Do you mean your actual father's house or the imperial capital?"(君のお父さんっち、それとも帝都？） LOL.

Yeah we shouldn't think too deeply into this.

53 minutes ago, sndwurks said:

I fear we are getting dangerously close to the subject of the printing press, and how bizarre the idea is that Rokugani does not have widespread use of a technology common to 7th century China.

They do have the printing press, at least the sort that existed in 7th century China. It is very clear that books exist, and those would have been created using the wood-block print process. What they might not have is movable type printing press. But that was literally introduced into Japan only at the very start of the Edo period.

And, again, I don't know for certain that they don't have it in Rokugan-- but if they are using kanji, and the fact that you might be using one multiple times in the same text, it is likely so very time consuming to set up your message using the wood-block printing press that people would still overwhelmingly rely on handwriting whenever possible.

Given the sector of Rokugani society that all of the focus is on in the game, and the fact that most communication we read is personal and not something that would be mass-produced, it is very possible that exactly the sort of printing press they had in the Edo period exists in Rokugan and it has simply never been relevant to the story.

38 minutes ago, HelloRPG said:

Or if Rokuganese is something akin to real world Japanese....some of the names are very silly if used in the real world. For example, Otou-san-uchi = literally translated as "Father's house" [お父さん家、お父さんっち]; "I'm going to Otou-san-uchi! (僕はお父さんっちに行ってくる！）" "Do you mean your actual father's house or the imperial capital?"(君のお父さんっち、それとも帝都？） LOL.

Yeah we shouldn't think too deeply into this.

People tend to call the capital "The Forbidden City" and well... that same confusion can happen with actual place names in Japanese.

In fact, not Japanese. I imagine there are place names in every language that could be misunderstood in such a way.

Furthermore, with that particular example, the confusion in your example wouldn't be so much between whether you were referring to the capital or your own father's house because you wouldn't call your own father "Otou-san" to another person unless that person were your sibling. The more likely confusion would be between whether you were talking about the house of the person you were talking to or the imperial capital.

Really, it is odd the capital should be named that. Even if it were meant to be "House of the Father", it should be "Otousama no uchi"-- and it isn't as though the different between "san" and "sama" was lost on the original creators it seems.

Printed books are definitely a thing. Taka turned up with some in a 1st ed adventure hook for City of Lies.

10 hours ago, KidChainsaw said:

I haven't finished the book yet, but it doesn't look like they are in there. Gunpowder weapons did exist and had a big impact on warfare during the Sengoku period and later. I have also read about ninja using gunpowder bombs as weapons and breaching charges.

Oh, teppo are matchlock firearms ?

I don't expecto to see them. Doesn't make much sense but John Wick really hated (and still does if Blood and Honor is anything to go by) guns in is samurai stories, nevermind that samurai and guns coexisted for some 300 years and they loved them. That kind of stuck around and other than a couple alternate takes like the one in Imperial Histories II there haven't been rules for them.

I really don't like the post-facto explanations for it, all the more when you didn't need to add the Battle of White Stag to the setting, and the pragmatic nature of the Crab and the Scorpion (seriously the Kaiu should be all over that ****), but since my own take on Rokugan is more based on the Heian period I can live with it.

10 hours ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

I am not so terribly sure of this. Yes, they say that sometimes and on occasion we see shugenja doing things so powerful as to suggest they could counter an army, but most of the time-- the shugenja tricks are not so overwhelming or reliable that they make armies utterly obsolete as this would suggest.

If they were that powerful, the empire would just do away with samurai and ashigaru all together and the entire empire would just be run by shugenja shaping the empire and lording over everyone using their godly magic.

Rather instead, we see the samurai without any magical abilities being the heroes, champions and shapers of the world more often than shugenja are.

Plus - compared to the traditional "A Wizard Did It" D&D settings, there is an inevitable limit to Shujenga's powers precisely because it's not magic; it's more akin to 40k sorcery - summon the attention ce of a daemon kami, ask politely, point at the intended victim and go "get 'im, Kevin-san*"

As a result, you're channelling the power of spirit-world beings who - according to the legends, theology and history of the world - by and large want the world to be shaped in accordance with the Celestial Order, meaning the Kami bloodlines on top, the peasants underneath, and most narratively significant things being achieved by honourable samurai with their swords.

6 hours ago, Suzume Chikahisa said:

I really don't like the post-facto explanations for it, all the more when you didn't need to add the Battle of White Stag to the setting, and the pragmatic nature of the Crab and the Scorpion (seriously the Kaiu should be all over that ****), but since my own take on Rokugan is more based on the Heian period I can live with it.

Well, whilst there's no firearms, the current RPG beta confirmed that more sophisticated ranged weapons (crossbows, repeater crossbows and even emplaced ballistae) are being used on the wall. Which is fair enough; most of the clans may not know (or want to know) what the crab have to face but as long as it's not being used on other samurai they're prepared to accept that there are some things which come out of the south that a normal arrow from a Yari is not going to stop.

The shadowlanders using the stuff would be a more interesting observation. I'm not anticipating goblin musketeers, but a Helm's Deep wall style mine is not impossible. After all, what's the risk - the Imperials want to kill them some more?

* Kami may not actually be called Kevin.

It is true that a Kaiu PC, out of the core book, is capable of building a repeating crossbow. The Togashi at my table spent 2 years of my campaign setting up an underground trade society that ferries Gaijin pepper to the Crab clan, so I've placed firearms in my Rokugan at an insanely high rarity. Most of them aren't projectile weapons, as much as they are Chinese flame lances that are more for effect and a small chance to afflict the burning condition (Fitness TN 2, Water 1, Earth 4 to resist). I have them use the basic bow stats, but every weapon gains the Prepare trait, and the largest ones take two actions.

Still, they are strictly outlawed in my Rokugan and unseen outside the Kaiu. I still occasionally add them in though if I'm going for that Kurasawa's Yojimbo feel of "he's only scary because he has a gun." Any bandit/pirate wielding such a weapon is probly famed enough to be pals with Yoritomo himself, however.

If I'm remembering right, the Dragon make fireworks.

Fireworks explode.

I would love to see the Crab fighting off an assault on the Wall around the time of a festival, and someone accidentally sets off a firework, which spirals out of control, over the Wall, and explodes an Oni.

The next month, the Crab Clan places the largest order of fireworks everywhere. "Oh, um, we're celebrating. Celebrating... a lot. It's, uh... 'We're Still Alive Today' day."

>_>

"Every day."